Edit: This only refers to costs (paid by the manufacturers), not fees (paid for by the buyers).
That’s so far from true. It’ll be cost of electricity. Heat. Distance shipped. They’ll probably tack on some country border crossing fee. They’ll find ways to make it more expensive simply because it’s an earth shattering technology.
Not necessarily. Still takes energy to move it. Depending on the energy required, could still have a cost
The cost will be comparatively less, and negligible given that digital goods don’t have “energy” fees (and never had, btw)
Why?
We traded energy cost for time when we stopped walking, and replaced it with an animal and a cart, and again with cars, and airplanes. We save time, but the energy input is greater.
Who’s to say that teleportation wouldn’t be a trade off between 5x the energy to take a jet, but instantaneous?
Digital goods aren’t physical; teleportation is physical.
Considering that
Power = WorkDone / TimeTaken
and lets just say for this instance that WorkDone is same for the jet and for the teleporter[1], which is kinda wrong, but won’t matter anyway as you see further.Then,
Powerteleporter = Powerjet × TimeTakenjet / TimeTakenteleporterthen going with “instantaneous”
With limit(TimeTakenteleporter ⟶ 0)
Powerteleporter ⟶ ∞
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
But that won’t happen, simply because the minimum value for WorkDone in that case would be equivalent to the change in gravitational potential, making it a significant amount as compared to the other limits.
Oh and digital goods do have an energy cost, btw.
because calculating work done in such a scenario is kinda hard ↩︎
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
Assuming the laws of physics still apply, work done is work done. You can improve efficiency, but that just means minimizing energy lost in the process. A boulder on top of a hill has X potential energy. Roll it down that hill, and that potential turns into kinetic energy that does work, like smashing a house at the base of the hill. If you move that boulder back to the top of the hill, the laws of thermodynamics say you need to put all that energy back into the boulder. Energy is always conserved. You have to do work to put the boulder back whether you use a bulldozer or a teleporter.
Even ignoring simple changes in altitude like this, you still have to consider momentum. We live on a big spinning rock. Let’s assume you live at the equator. On your daily trip around the globe you are zipping along to the East, which seems like a constant to you, but it isn’t. The direction East changes relative to the Sun depending on the time of day. At midnight, for example East is the same as the direction the Earth is moving in it’s orbit. If the Earth were to suddenly disappear, you would be flung off along the Earth’s orbit. At dawn, you are on the front of the planet in it’s orbit and East is pointing towards the sun. If the Earth disappeared now, you would be flung off towards the sun. At noon East is pointing back along Earth’s orbit and at sunset, it is pointing directly away from the Sun.
I’m rounding for convenience here. The Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference at the equator. Since it spins once per day that means the surface and you are zipping along with it at about 1,000 miles per hour. Now, unless the warehouse teleporting your goods to you is very nearby, it will have a significantly different momentum. Let’s say the warehouse is around 6,000 miles East of you. That puts it about a quarter of the way around the globe. When it’s dawn for you, it’s already noon for them. If the warehouse teleports something to you without accounting for that difference in momentum, the results would be dramatic to say the least.
Assume it is dawn at the warehouse. That means that their momentum is towards the sun at about 1,000 miles per hour. It’s midnight for you so you are moving 1,000 miles per hour in the direction of Earth’s orbit. When your product appears at your house, it is moving towards the ground at 1,000 miles per hour when it appears. If the warehouse were instead 6,000 miles West of you, then your shipments would appear and shoot through your roof at 1,000 miles per hour.
Similar things happen if you want to teleport to points North or South of you. As you move away from the equator, your relative velocity gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the one of the poles. Someone standing at the North pole, for example, is spinning in place very quickly compared to someone at the equator who is whipping around the globe each day. If you teleport something from the equator to a point 6,000 miles due north of you, it will appear moving West at about 500 miles per hour because you are moving around the Earth at 1,000 miles per hour while the destination is only moving 500 miles per hour. Something teleported to the North pole from the equator will appear and fling off parallel to the ground at 1,000 miles per hour.
This really depends.
Teleportation consists of three main phases:
- scanning/deconstruction
- sending
- reconstruction
If the deconstruction and/or reconstruction phases cost a ton of energy, it doesn’t matter if the sending phase has a high energy bill.
But since you have transmit data on each atom, you will have huge amounts of data to send.
For example, 1kg of carbon has about 5*10^25 atoms. Humans aren’t made entirely of carbon, but the rough order of magnitude will be similar. Let’s go with a 70kg human and we end up with roughly 10^27 atoms.
Let’s say we have good compression techniques and a single byte is enough to store all data of one atom. That means, we need to send about 10^28 bits of data.
In September 2023 the total bandwith of the global internet was about 1.2 Pbps, or 10^15 bits per second.
So to transmit a single human being with the speed of the entire global internet combined it would take 10^13 seconds or about 300 000 years. I think that kind of data transmission could cost a little bit of money.
Compare that to the cost of shipping 70kg of human being anywhere on the planet. By plane, it will cost in the order of a few thousand Euros and it will take one day, two at most, not 300 000 years.
With the greed of corporations you pay the premium tier for teleportation and low cost shipping to wait a few days.
Once teleportation exist, so do replicators and all costs apart from energy costs disappear.
Internet is technically teleportation (of data) and I am not seeing replicators anywhere.
With the interpretation of the internet being teleportation of data, your Webbrowser becomes a replicator of data, as e.g. the video that you are streaming from YouTube is merely being copied from its servers, but not deleted from its source.
In general computers are just copying data, i.e. replicating data.
deleted by creator
I see you are missing the the ever present influence of corporate greed.
Pay us $30 to get the package to your customer in 3 days, or $150 to get it there in the next hour. Why $150? because people will pay it.
I’d imagine the energy cost to teleport something would be much higher than a vehicle, just faster.
Also thanks to Capitalism, even if it was 0 energy and instant, the fees would stay or go up. A business under capitalism will never voluntarily decrease potential profits in the long term.
“If I make something up, I can make up whatever I want about it.”
Yup.
